Puzzle Galaxies

This post is from the now defunct website “A GameDev Plays…”, copied here for posterity

Puzzle Galaxies is,
unsurprisingly, a simple puzzle game. It is moderately entertaining and
kept me playing for an hour, despite an unpolished feel. Considering the
very low cost (US$0.99, or even less when bundled) there is definitely
value for money. It is a decent, but unspectacular game.

The basic gameplay is matching together jewels into sets of four. When
all the jewels on a level have been matched the level is complete and
onto the next one (68 in total). The difficulty comes from a timer
giving the player a few minutes or less to complete the level, and
“aliens” which steal jewels from uncompleted sets and move them around.

The game is not hard and quickly mastered. Soon after starting failure
only came as the result of distraction - most levels being completed
well within the time limit. The gameplay is enjoyable and there is just
enough challenge to motivate a player to “just see what the next level
looks like”. Unfortunately the next level normally looks extremely
similar to the previous level - perhaps with an extra alien or slightly
more jewels. The game does become a little repetitive. I used the same
tactics from start to finish: first prioritise getting a few easy sets
completed, (this reduces the search for the required jewels later); then
build up some close sets across the level, focusing on areas away from
the aliens; finally, slowly sets will be completed until the last few
are trivial.

As for negatives, this game is noticeably unpolished. It can’t obviously
be played in windowed mode (the developer has posted an obscure
workaround,
but this is something most games have as an options setting). Buttons
sometimes can’t be clicked without any indication they have become
inactive. The game also makes the player wait. This feels like a fast
game, each level is quite short, so the game should move the player
quickly forward. However, loading screens, score screens, all take some
time. I prefer something faster for a timed, quick puzzle game. If the
game started the next level within seconds of finishing the previous
level I probably would have gone deeper into the game just through
inertia: “oh the next level has started, I guess I’ll just give it a
quick try”. Instead the frequent pauses gave me time to think about
other things I could/should be doing.

The theme is very lightly applied. Each level is supposed to be another
galaxy, the aliens look like little space ships and the background image
is space. That’s it as far as the space setting. The basic gameplay has
nothing to do with space, it is really just a
tile-matching
game. It would take little to re-skin it as goblins stealing jewels from
treasure chests, or computer viruses corrupting programs in memory.
Using a space theme has not added anything to the game.